Many users desire free, reliable storage over the Internet. To attract and accommodate users, several online messaging services provide free user accounts and free storage to their account holders. Most services include at least 2 MB storage capacity with each account that would presumably be used to save important messages and/or any related attachments. Unfortunately, such storage can be used for many things not intended by the supplier of the system such as storage of pornographic images or videos, possibly illegal in nature, storage of illegally copied software (“warez”), storage of MP3s or other audio files (possibly in violation of copyright laws), and/or storage of generic data (e.g., to back up important files from a hard drive).
Users may store this data for their own use, or may store it to share and trade with or sell to others. Users generally prefer this form of storage both because it is free and because it offers a layer of anonymity. Unfortunately, such storage can become very expensive for the message service provider (MSP) because users fill up their accounts with large amounts of data quickly. In addition, in many scenarios, such as when the data is accessed in an automated way, the provider loses a revenue opportunity, since the automation software will likely not show ads in a way that the downloader can see them.
To some extent, such storage abuse appears inevitable. Before most MSPs added some type of human intervention (e.g., solving a human interactive proof (HIP) (also called a CAPTCHA or reverse Turing test)) to the account set-up process for their small storage (2 MB) accounts, their systems were frequently abused. Users would create hundreds or thousands of accounts and then store data in them (split up into parts) using automation both for splitting and for re-assembly. Large operating system or application files were commonly split and perhaps illegally shared in this way. The HIP effectively made this too much effort because creating the hundreds or thousands of accounts became too annoying.
Recently, storage sizes offered by at least a few MSPs have been significantly increased or are expected to drastically increase in the near future. For instance, a few MSPs are offering 250 MB of free storage. Another is offering 1 GB of free storage. Unfortunately, this MSP already has a File System named after it, which is an automated storage system that abuses its accounts.